Silver Pen Allows For Hand-Written Circuits 161
Zothecula writes "People have been using pens to jot down their thoughts for thousands of years but now engineers at the University of Illinois have developed a silver-inked rollerball pen that allows users to jot down electrical circuits and interconnects on paper, wood and other surfaces. Looking just like a regular ballpoint pen, the pen's ink consists of a solution of real silver that dries to leave electrically conductive silver pathways. These pathways maintain their conductivity through multiple bends and folds of the paper, enabling users to personally fabricate low-cost, flexible and disposable electronic devices."
Conductive tattoo ink (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not slashdot too! (Score:4, Interesting)
Original article here [wiley.com] (sorry, no free version available). I find ridiculous that they provide (mostly self) references to existing art, but they fail to mention commercial felt-tip silver pens.
By a quick look at the paper, their ink has a resistivity of 2*10^(-4) Ohm*cm (25 C print temperature) which is not so lower than the 5*10^(-4) Ohm*cm commercially available ink [mgchemicals.com]. They do reach lower resistivity, but with high temperature annealing, so it cannot be compared directly (and they fail to).
Maybe their ink is more flexible, but again they fail to provide comparison with existing ink.
Their ink has probably lower viscosity due to the use of nanoparticles (they are working between 1 and 10 Pa*s) and this probably allows for the use of rollerball pens, but if felt-tip pens are working fine with a most likely cheaper ink, why should I care?
However they do manage to master the acronyms creation art, providing the catchy PoP shorthening for their groundbreaking pen-on-paper circuit drawing approach...